If you’ve ever had the honor of walking into the Patagonia offices in Ventura, CA and being greeted by the guy pictured above – Chipper – then you should consider yourself a lucky son of a bitch. And chances are good that you’ll never forget The Nicest And Most Enthusiastic Man In The World. Read a great interview with Chip “Chipper Bro” Bell, the 11 time (!) World Frisbee Freestyle Champion at Patagonia’s great blog/site, The Cleanest Line. When you’re done there, rush over and WATCH THIS.

Craig – How did you come to work at Patagonia?

Chip – I had just finished a ten-year tour with the Pro Frisbee® Freestyle circuit and was looking for a job. I heard that Patagonia was hiring, so I applied and they hired me. I was super stoked to find out that the company provided benefits because I was newly married with a baby on the way.

Craig – You are an 11-time World Frisbee Freestyle Champion. How did you get involved in the sport?

Chip – Frisbee Freestyle was considered a cool, alternative sport in the late ‘70s. I started playing with friends in Santa Barbara, which was the mecca for Freestyle enthusiasts. Eventually my passion became a livelihood and I traveled all over the world with my team. We were world champions for over ten years. This is my thirty-third year as a pro.

John Martin of Vice recently interviewed Burt Avedon (Richard’s cousin) about Willis & Geiger, the expedition gear brand started by Ben Willis at the beginning of the 20th century. Along with Abercrombie & Fitch and Filson, Willis & Geiger was one of the first outdoor-clothing companies and outfitted some of the era’s most famous explorers: Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Roald Amundsen, Admiral Richard E. Byrd, Sir Edmund Hillary, and Tenzing Norgay.

Mr. Avedon revived the company two years after it went out of business in 1977 and helmed it until it was liquidated in 1999. Read the whole interview here:

Burt Avedon: Let me just ask you a question: Having done some research on your publication, your audience is the antithesis of our company and our lives. Because it’s young, 18 to 35, as they say, and countercultural—are we anathema, or are we the contrast vehicle?

Neither. I think that young people right now are very interested in anything related to American heritage, especially in regard to fashion.
We haven’t found that to be the case. We find that the youth are not at all interested in things that have long histories and heritage and integrity and all that. They are interested in reading predominately what’s new and what’s contemporary.

There is a lot of that with the pace of media right now, where people are always looking to see who’s putting out the newest sneakers, but there are a few brands whose authenticity is paramount.
Yeah, but unfortunately good brands of heritage are a reflection of their original management; when they become professionally managed, they lose the spark that brought them to where they are today. I found that to be classic in the industry. Whenever they go into second- and third-generation management, they lose themselves. They no longer have the passion that was originally part of their DNA.

Day at Night was a public television program that aired from 1973-1974, hosted by the late James Day, former president of both San Francisco’s KQED and New York’s WNET. Above is an interview with Wallace Stegner who eloquently talks about the dream and history of the American West; “This was a kind of a Huckleberry Finn place to grow up, a marvelous place for a child.” There’s mention of Hudson Bay Company, Scarlet Fever, and of course, The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Well worth watching during your lunch break.

…there with the pepper trees and the bright sun outside, they could still, for just so long as the picture lasted, maintain a world peculiar to men who like to make Westerns, a world of loyalties and fond raillery, of sentiment and shared cigars, of interminable desultory recollections; campfire talk, its only point to keep a human voice raised against the night, the wind, the rustlings in the brush.

I don’t know why it’s taken so long to post these photos, but last summer I found my way up to southern Maine to visit one of my favorite artists in the history of artists, Peter Parnall. He showed us around his house, talked our heads off about working with Byrd Baylor and told us a few stories about the little people that live in the woods behind his house. More to come, but for now, check out the photos (taken by Kalen) after the jump.

John Gierach is an American author and freelance writer living and working in Larimer County, Colorado. He has to date written over 20 books on fly-fishing, and is a regular contributor to Field & Stream, as well as having a monthly column in the NY Times. Watch that video above and chew on it for a bit.

Mark Kryskow, one of my best friends from the University of Colorado, is someone I’ve written about before here on CS, describing him as an “animal, more fit and strong and crazy than anyone I have ever met, or probably ever will meet.” It was impossible to keep up with Mark in college. Waking up at 3am to ride your bike to Estes Park and back (37 miles each way in the mountains) was not part of my agenda. Mark lives up in New Hampshire now, so I get to see him pretty regularly, either in North Conway for an ice climbing adventure, in Portsmouth (while visiting my folks) for a beer and a burrito, or in Alton at his house on Lake Winnepsaukee, alongside his equally crazy immediate and extended family.

Mark is one of the humblest guys I’ve ever met, so of course he didn’t tell me that he was featured in an article in Outside this month, in a profile of the Army program he works for, studying the effects of altitude and extreme conditions on the human body. When I called him last night to talk about it, he quickly changed the subject, probably because they refer to him as one of the “hardest of the hard” and pull a quote that details a test that involved a tube up his ass. The article isn’t specifically about Mark, but I couldn’t be happier to see him gracing the pages of Outside. Makes it even better that he and his wife don’t give a shit.

One of the hardest of the hard men is Sergeant Kryskow, a recreation rock and ice climber who has participated in “eight or nine studies,” including one designed to test a helmet prototype that cooled the wearer’s head with streams of air coming from the lining. Researchers wanted to know if cooling the head cooled the body as well. To test this, Kryskow and others walked for hours on a treadmill in 120-degree heat, fitted with anal and esophageal temperature probes.

“It was kind of miserable,” Kryskow tells me, suddenly transported back to that test. “You’re tired, you’re dehydrated, you’ve got a probe in your ass and another down your throat. But I like the challenge.”

What is hardcore? Fitz Cahall over at Dirtbag Diaries (a CS fav) ponders this claim to be the “homecoming king of the outdoor adventure world”. Remember, talk is cheap but does this even matter? Fitz picks apart the titles in this most recent Dirtbag Diaries podcast.

“Lots of us push ourselves towards something bigger. Busting our lungs on trail runs, entering cyclocross races, crashing bikes, skinning up ridges until we don’t think we’ll have the legs to ski down, kicking crampon steps a thousand at a time, wondering why we got out of bed and packed a backpack before our neighbors even got home from the bar. All of these are entry points to hardcore, things that can break you if you let them, but none of them by themselves is a universal litmus test for being hardcore. Perhaps hardcore can be pursued, but can never be achieved …like enlightenment.”

Bill Hafeman was a master birch-bark canoe builder from Big Fork, Minnesota. CBS interviewed Hafeman in 1982, where at the time Hafeman was seen as one of the last craftsman left in America still building these canoes. CBS returned in 2008 to interview Hafeman’s grandson, who carries on his grandfather’s legacy, building birch-bark canoes by hand in the north woods.

Hafeman in his 1982 interview…

“I wanted to live in a wild country like the Indians did … I didn’t want to live in a city where you go to work by a whistle, go home by a whistle.”